"The studio had been left in an
extremely disreputable condition, with many cigarette butts stubbed
into the carpet, empty beer cans, bottles and wine flagons. The stench
of sour liquor was very obvious."
- extract from an ABC
internal memo

"If the Minister were dinkum he'd pick up this piece of
garbage between finger and thumb and get rid of it."
- Gordon
Leed, Radio 6PR Perth

"... perhaps the least loveable offspring spawned by
the ABC."
- B&T

"... the
lowest form of radio this country has produced"
- Bob Baeck, general manager of 3XY Melbourne

"From day one, Double J was an incredible
signifier of hope. Counter-culture at that stage in Australia had
really been unfocused, and all of a sudden we had a crucial and central
gathering point."- Dan Arthur, Double Jay listener

Sydney radio station
2JJ -- Double Jay, a it was universally known --
was
one of the last legacies of the progressive media policies of
the Whitlam Labor government (1972-75). Double Jay's establishment at
the
beginning of 1975 revolutionised Sydney radio, shook up the ABC and
marked the start
of a new era of Australian broadcasting. The pioneering and sometimes
controversial station eventually became the foundation stone
of today's Triple J national FM radio network.

Fine and mild ...

Before the watershed of
the Labor reforms in 1974-75, Australian radio was a closed shop
-- rigidly controlled, conservative and for the most part, frankly
often rather dull. An all-powerful government authority, the
Broadcasting
Control Board, administered policy, set broadcast standards
and supervised content for commercial radio and TV. Under the
BCB's conservative regime, Australian had to wait until 1975 to
gain access to stereo FM radio and colour television -- technologies
that had been established for years, even decades, in other countries.
Prior to 1974 in Australia, all professional radio programs were
broadcast in mono on the AM radio band, while the FM band was used
exclusively for television broadcasts, which were also in mono.

Until 1975 Australian radio was locked
into a two-tiered system established in the 1930s. One tier
was the network of local and national stations of the Australian
Broadcasting Commission (ABC). The other was the clique of
powerful and profitable commercial radio stations.
From the inception of radio in Australia, tight governmental control
was conterbalanced -- and often subverted -- by the
lobbying
power of the commercial stations, who were keen
to keep Australia bound to this two-tiered system.

This does not mean that
was no pressure for chance. For years, community and ethnic groups
had pressured the government to provide a third tier. They argued
that:

"...the radio frequency spectrum
was a natural resource that didn't alter because of national
boundaries. If countries like the USA had literally thousands of
stations on the AM band, why couldn't Australia? And if they had over a
thousand FM stations, why couldn't we? Of course, the answer was that
the only thing stopping us was the control board's restrictive planning
criteria." (Westerway, 1996)

Keen to protect their lucrative oligopoly, the
commercial sector lobbied hard and long against
diversification. They disingenuously claimed
that the AM band could not carry any more stations (it could, easily),
that the FM
band should be reserved solely for television broadcasts, and
that Australia (unlike all other countries) should use the UHF
band for FM radio. The commercial broadcasters exerted considerable
influence over government policy -- an influence which only grew as
radio and TV became more and more central to political debate
--
and over the Broadcasting Control Board which,
according to Peter Westerway, had itself been set up specifically
because of pressure from commercial licensees. Thes pressures ensured
that
commercial radio's cosy cartel remained unchallenged until the
last year of the Whitlam government.

The Sydney radio scene in
1974 was the largest and most profitable market in Australia, but it
was broadly representative of the braodcasting structure that
had
been in place in the capital cities since the two-tiered structure was
established in 1932. There were two ABC stations
and six commercial stations, all broadcasting in mono on the AM band.
The radio dial from bottom to top in those days was:

2FC (576 kHz), the Sydney station in the ABC national
network (now Radio National)

2BL (702 kHz) -- the ABC local station, with some
programs relayed from Melbourne

2GB (873 kHz) -- mainly talk, sport and light MOR
music. Its call sign is a relic of its original ownership by the Grace
Brothers retail chain

2UE (954) -- pop music and some talkback. In
the early-mid Sixties it was Sydney's leading pop station, and
long-serving breakfast DJ Garry O'Callaghan was for many years the most
popular announcer in the city

2KY (1017 kHz) -- owned by the NSW Labor Council (a
union body) and featured light music, sorting and racing broadcasts and
talkback

2UW (1110) -- after switching to an all-pop format in 1964,
it
dubbed its on-air team "The 11-10 Men". It was Sydney's top pop station
for several years in the late 1960s, and fought a prolonged ratings
battle with rival 2SM in the early 1970s. Its forrtunes declined
rapidly after the introduction of FM broadcasting. It eventually sold
its AM licence station and no longer operates
on the AM band, having moved to the FM band to become 2DAY-FM (now part
of the Ausstereo network)

2CH (1170) was owned by the Australian Council of
Churches. For some years it carried a mix of talk, music
and foreign-language
programs serving various ethnic communities, but in 1972 it cancelled
all its "ethnic" programs and switched to a bland mix of so-called
"easy listening" music, with some religious content

2SM (1269) took the lead from 2UW in the early '70s
and ruled supreme as the leading pop station in the city from then
until the advent of commercial FM radio in the early 80s .

The Labor Innovations

The ALP's left wing had long hoped to effect a major
opening-up of the media. Although it notably avoided going up against
commercial TV proprietors over the thorny issue of Austrsalian content
levels on TV, in its last year in power the Whitlam government managed
to ram through a raft of remakable reforms that shook
up Australia's moribund radio industry.

The legislative and licencing innovations
introduced by the Whitlam's ministers, Doug McLelland
and Dr Moss Cass, enabled Australia to finally catch up with
overseas innovations
like FM stereo radio and colour TV, and eventually put Australia ahead
of the rest
of the world in some areas. McClelland and Cass acted to open
up
both the FM frequency band (then only being used for TV broadcasts)
and the AM band, in line with Labor's policy to promote
minority and public access
to the media.

The McClelland and Cass realised that the
Broadcasting Control Board's complex
and expensive licensing processes could have held up change
for years, and with the government's hold on power rapidly slipping
during 1975,
Moss Cass acted to cut the Gordian knot by exploiting a loophole
in the ancient (1905) Wireless Telegraphy Act and issuing
temporary experimental community broadcasting licences on
the FM band in
each state.

"In fact, the minister's
manoeuvre may well have been illegal. But it was never challenged in
court and it was effective. Community radio stations were licensed in
both the AM and FM bands, ranging through fine music stations (like
2MBS and 3MBS) to stations based on educational institutions (such as
5UV Adelaide and 2MCE FM Bathurst) to student stations like 4ZZZ
Brisbane and an even more radical innovations like the ethnic stations,
2EA Sydney and 3EA Melbourne." (Westerway, 1996)

Labor's other vital innovation
was the licensing of two new AM band stations for the ABC -- one in
Sydney (2JJ) and one in Melbourne (the shortlived 3ZZ). McClelland also
set up the McLean Committee
to inquire into Australian broadcasting. The committee's report, tabled
in early 1974, completely rejected the claims of the
the commercial lobby. The government accepted its recommendations,
including the finding that Australia should use the 88-108 MHz
band for FM broadcasting.

After the McLean Report
was handed down, Whitlam assigned members of his Priorities Review
Staff to look at all aspects of the allocation of radio frequencies.
They reported in August that year, endorsing McLean's main
recommendation
to create a new pluralistic model for the local industry, one
which would create "a structure of stations varying from
place to place around Australia, providing for general and sectional
needs." They rejected McLean's proposal that new stations
be run by the Department of the Media but enthusiastically seconded
his recommendation for the establishment of a series of new
publicly-funded
community stations.

In September, Senator McClelland
announced that Cabinet had agreed to offer the ABC two new stations,
one each in Sydney and Melbourne, and this offer was quickly accepted.
At the suggestion of David White of the PM's office, and Peter
Martin from McClelland's office, the ABC chose to dedicate the
Sydney station decided to contemporary rock and pop music, aimed
it at the 18-25 age group and providing "a wide range of popular
music in the rock, jazz, pop and folk fields"; the Melbourne
station would be a community access station. Both stations were
considered
experimental and their performance was to be reviewed after 12
months.

"Same as it ever was ..."

To understand the almost revolutionary impact of Double Jay,
it's
important to realise
just how conservative Australian radio was in the post-war years.
Until 1975, there were only two ABC stations and six
commercial radio stations each in Sydney and Melbourne - all on
the AM band. There were even fewer in other capitals, regional
centres and country towns. Incredibly, there had been no new licences
issued in any Australian capital city since 1932!

After the brief heyday of
the mid-60s 'beat boom', commercial pop radio had become repetitive,
conservative and derivative, locked into strict programming regimes
and largely dependant on trite, formulaic presentation and promotional
concepts imported from the USA -- a 'tradition' which continues
to this day with second-hand, second-rate ideas like "The
Morning Crew".

The ABC of the late
'50s and '60s was, musically speaking, quite conservative, and
slow to pick up on the massive success and popularity of rock
and pop music, although its broad charter and national audience made a
"middle of the road" music policy more or less
inevitable. But by the late 60s and early 70s things began to
change as new, younger staff began to move into presentation and
production. Even so, only a tiny amount of the ABC's total airtime
was devoted to modern music, and the few selections aired were
carefully selected so as not to offend older or more conservative
listeners.

Because of the structural
peculiarities, Australia also missed out on some of the important
developments that affected radio and popular music in Europe and
America. The Australian system was structurally somewhat freer
than in the UK where the BBC completely dominated radio until
the late Sixties. But Australia experienced nothing like the heady
experimentalism of pirate stations like Radio Caroline, Radio
Essex and Radio London or even New Zealand's Radio
Hauraki . We also lacked other important influences -- the
powerful European stations like Radio Luxembourg, which broadcast
all over the Continent and into the UK, and the equally far-reaching
broadcasts of the Armed Forces Network and Voice Of
America, which introduced jazz, R&B and blues to so many
European listeners.

Although Australia had a
fully government-funded national public broadcasting system --
which America did not -- our relatively small population meant
that we had nothing to rival the remarkable diversity of US commercial
radio, where there were dozens of commercial stations in every
major city, many of which were entirely devoted to specific genres
like jazz, gospel and country. In addition there was a national
public radio network (supported by a mix of government, corporate
and listener funding) and scores of community access and college
radio stations.

Another crucial influence
in the development of rock & roll music in the US and Canada
was the southern and mid-western stations which pumped out blues,
R&B and country music, often in live broadcasts. Their
enormously
powerful transmitters could reach across thousands of square miles
of the central USA and far into Canada, and like Voice of America
did in Europe, the Midwestern stations introduced many future
music stars to the music of the original country, blues, R&B
and rock'n'roll artists.

Room To Move

2JJ was specifically created
in response to the perceived need to provide an alternative to
commercial pop/rock radio for the 18-25 age group, buy its
establishment was the culmination of a gradual process in the ABC over
the previous
decade. Although the general trend was conservative -- especially
in commercial radio -- the ABC's wide-ranging charter to "inform,
educate and entertain" nevertheless enabled it to pioneer
some notable programming innovations.

For conservative critics of the ABC, then and now, the eminence grise
behind this broad push for reform was ABC producer Allan
Ashbolt, whose 'radical' views and strident opposition to the
war in Vietnam made him the 1960s equivalent of Philip Adams --
a dangerous and persuasive "lefty" whose insiduous views had supposedly
won him a loyal clique among younger ABC staff members.

In 1971 the ABC launched
Room To Move on Radio 1 (now Radio National).
It
was hosted by Chris Winter, and produced by Ron Moss,
both of whom would figure prominently in the early history of
Double Jay. Winter had dropped out of university and moved in
to music, mixing the sound for the stage production of HAIR
before joining the ABC as a presenter in 1969. Behind the scenes,
musician Keith Glass (then starring in Hair) and
his friend, collector and writer David "Dr Pepper" Pepperell
(founders of pioneering Melbourne import shop Archie
& Jughead's) played an important role in the show's early
stages, advising Moss and Winter on material.

Named after a John Mayall
track, the show drew on programming ideas from UK pirate radio,
American AOR ("album oriented rock") FM stations, college
radio, and John Peel's famous BBC radio show The Perfumed
Garden.Room To Move played the latest alternative
and progressive
music from Australia and overseas -- tracks which almost never
got an airing on the commercials. It favoured album tracks rather than
singles and played entire sides from new LPs
like as Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells, and Jethro
Tull's Thick As A Brick, which were specifically
designed to be heard as a single piece, and which were usually only
heard
on commercial radio in drastically edited form, if at all.

The rationale behind the show was obvious:
developments in music overseas were simply not being reflected
in the playlists of the commercial stations. By the time Room To Move
was on the air, Australian pop (commercial) radio had undergone some
significant changes. For half of 1970, From May to
November, the
commercial sector was locked in a bitter dispute with record companies
-- the co-called 1970 Radio Ban. The Ban -- whose legality
wouldthese days be questionable at best -- was in
fact an
industry-level 'trade
embargo' imposed on commercial radio by a group of major record
companies.

Following the enactment of the Copyright Act 1968 and the
subsequent
formation of a new peak body for the record industry, the Australian
Record Industry Association (ARIA), a group of five major labels --
Warner, EMI, CBS, RCA and Festival -- scrapped longstanding agreements
with commercial radio over the supply of promotional recordings. They
then demanded that a new royalty should paid on any of their
recordings played on air, arguing that this was only fair because they
were providing radio stations with all their music programming for free.

Commercial radio not surprisingly balked at this outrageous
demand,
arguing that they were providing the record companies with
massive
amounts of free promotion and publicity and that a new royalty was
therefore grossly unfair. The arguments dragged on over months, but in
May 1970 talks broke down, so the record companies imposed a ban on the
supply of promo records.

More music?

Shows like Room To Move
highlighted the increasingly parlous state of Australian commercial
rock
programming in the early '70s. There was a variety of factors
involved, but the net result was that in the late '60s and early
'70s Australian radio was one of the dullest listens in the western
media.

From 1970 there was a radical reworking of commerical
programming
and presentations styles, with the trend moving rapidly
towards a narrow focus on ratings, highly structured and
aggressively
marketed programming styles, and playlists aimed squarely at affluent
young Australians, especially teenage girls. Commercial playlists
were controlled with almost mechanical precision, compiled according
to American-devised market research methods which tended to reinforce
repetition and familiarity at the expense of novelty and diversity.
Commercial radio music playlists rarely exceeded 4-50 songs -- during
its heyday in the early Seventies, the prime-time playlist
on Sydney's 2SM reputedly had twenty songs or less, and
at peak times there were as few as 10-15 songs on high rotation.

Programmers began to rely more and more
on targeted audience polls and 'focus groups', although the inherent
biases in these methods
of audience 'research' made the surveys more or less a self-fulfilling
prophecy. Material which fell outside the arbitrary rules devised
by programmers rarely made the cut, and such recordings were typically
relegated
to late-night 'graveyard' shifts or at weekends, if they were played at
all.

Singles were
almost universally the format of choice, and the trend persisted
here long after album-oriented programming had become a major feature
of radio in the UK and the USA -- a trend reinforced by the long delay
in the arrival of FM radio, which had already had a major imapct on
American radio industry.
Consequently, many tracks which became hits overseas were
almost never heard here, and anything exceeeding the standard 3-minute
duration was generally binned -- although admittedly
there were occasional exceptions like The Beatles'"HeyJude",
Russell Morris' "The Real Thing", T-Rex's "Hot
Love" and Led
Zeppeplin's "Kashmir".

There was some leeway for
presenters' personal choices, but nothing like the freedom formerly
enjoyed by presenters like Rofe and Austin. In general any music
deemed "non-commercial" was simply not played, and this
meant that over the years many important musical genres were ignored.
It also must be said that there was a degree
of racism involved and often this was quite overt -- radio historian
Wayne Mac has recounted the anecdote of the unfortunate Melbourne DJ
who premiered "River Deep, Mountain High" on the air, only to have the
program manager rip the single off the turntable at the end of
the
song, accompanied by a stern admonition to to "never play that
nigger shit on my station again".

Prominent casualties of this covert racial band included many
leaders of the
emerging black music styles of the 60s and 70s, like urban blues,
soul, R&B, funk and reggae. Artists like Hendrix, James Brown,
Stax, Atlantic, etc, were rarely played. Reggae was
another classic example -- although it had become a major force in the
UK by 1975, thanks to the huge success of Bob Marley, and exerted a
crucial infuence on punk and New Wave, it had no
impact whatsoever in Australia until the establishment of Double
Jay. Other non-commercial styles like the progressive rock of
the early '70s were just as much ignored -- and this regrettably
applied to many top-line Australian acts like Company
Caine
and Spectrum.

Another restricting
factor
was the cosy relationship between commercial stations and the
large overseas-owned record labels. The payola scandals of the
'50s did not end the corruption; it merely became subtler. It
was all too easy for record companies to influence programmers,
and as a result, Australian radio tended to slavishly followed
overseas trends, often ignoring the wealth of local talent at
their disposal. This problem was tacitly encouraged by the toothless
local content regulations, a fault not properly addressed until
the advent of the Whitlam government.

"Smut"

Censorship was another area
of serious concern. In all areas of the media, the so-called
"censorship
wars" had been raging through the 1960s and into the early '70s.
Notable skirmishes
included the now-legendary court cases to suppress Oz
magazine,
both here and in the UK, the battles over banned books like Philip
Roth's novel Portnoy's Complaint, the Swedish film I
Am Curious Yellow, the musical The Boys In The Band,
and Alex Buzo's stage play Norm and Ahmed.

Needless to say, pop music
did not escape the censors' notice. Any lyrical content construed
as advocating drug use would be instantly banned; this fate befell
The Byrds' "Eight Miles High" in the US following a review
in an industry programming guide which alleged that song contained
drug references -- an assertion the band themselvs still hotly refute.

Lines
which would pass totally unnoticed today were often classified as
obscene.
Expressions as coy as "making love" could result in
the song being bleeped, or having the sound briefly "dropped
out" if it was lucky enough to get to air. Blatant sex or
drug references, "bad" language or blasphemy would result
in an instant ban -- The Bentbeaks' 1967 single Caught Red
Handed
was banned by Melbourne radio for alleged obscenity, presumably because
programmer thought (rightly or wrngly) that it was about masturbation.
The Easybeats' "Heaven and Hell" fell foul
of US
censors in 1968 because of the line "discovering someone
else in your bed" and in 1969 even Flying Circus' seemingly harmless
debut single "Hayride" was threatened with a similar
ban
when it was released in New Zealand because of the line "making love in
the hay".

One of the worst
culprits
in radio was Sydney's 2SM, whose majority shareholder was the Roman
Catholic Archdiocese of Sydney. Throughout the '60s and well into
'70s the church's rigid censorship of the the playlist resulted
in many famous songs being heavily censored or banned outright.
Famous vicitms included The Beatles' Ballad of John &
Yoko
(at first banned, later bleeped because of its use of
the
word "Christ" in the chorus), Lou Reed's "Walk
On The Wild Side" (banned for the reference to "giving
head") and even The Hollies' "Too Young To Be Married"
(banned for its theme of premarital sex).

The Money-Go-Round

Probably the most important difference between commercial
radio
and Double Jay was who paid for it. When the Whitlam government
came to power in December 1972 one of its first actions was to
abolish TV and radio licence fees, which had previously formed
a significant portion of the ABC's budget, and the national broadcaster
switched
to a system of direct budget allocation. This was obviously
a popular move at the time, although it became apparent in the
post-Whitlam
era that with the removal of this independent funding source, the
ABC became reliant on the good graces of the incumbent government.

As a special unit of the
ABC, 2JJ was commercial free, and therefore no requirement to
answer to or appease sponsors and advertisers. For commercial
stations, ratings were the "prime directive", and the
sole indicator of success. Ratings gave advertisers a gauge (however
accurate, or not) of how many people were listening to the station
at any given time, providing benchmark by which they could set
their advertising rates. This advertising income was of course
what kept the stations on air, and for a successful station it
could be (to borrow the old newspaper phrase) a "river of
gold". The reliance on finding the winning formula to attract
listeners led to a situation that stifled choice, and where significant
trends in local and overseas music were never heard on Australian
radio.

"The Head Of
The Dial"

Against this background in late 1974
the ABC launched its bold radio experiment : to establish
Australia's first non-commercial 24-hour radio station devoted
to entirely to rock music. It was set up as an autonomous experimental
project,
under the control of the ABC's Contemporary Radio Unit, which
had overseen earlier programs like Room To Move.
It was to be largely independent, and run by two staff-elected
coordinators, an organisational model that influenced the development
of The Coming Out Show.

The first station coordinators were Marius Webb and Ron Moss.
They were given the job after a meeting with ABC management
in September
1974, during which it was explained that the ABC had been given two
licences, one of which was for a "youth-style station", and that the
Sydney station was to be up and running within three months. Webb
recalls an
ABC executive saying: "You'll be on the air by January. Thank you very
much, I've got another meeting."

Towards the end of the year, the first recruitment notices
appeared in papers, stressing that a sense of the ridiculous was
required. Producer Ted Robinson says: "There was a bit of concern about
breaking down what was considered to be 'an announcer' in terms of
finding ways other than the traditional approach." Staff were chosen
from across the country, with Webb and Moss ensuring a good mix of ABC
and commercial people.

The budget for Double
Jay's
first year was just under $800,000,-- $500,000 on salaries for
the thirty-strong staff and the rest on running expenses. Double
Jay has traditionally been portrayed as starved of resources and
funding, which was true to an extent -- staff certainly had to
scrounge equiment and the station had to make do for many years
with what had been built as emergency studios and 2BL's emergency (AM
band) transmitter, which had
a limited range and specific transmission "blind spots in many
areas of Sydney, especially the North Shore ans the Eastern Suburbs.
However ABC historian
Kenneth Inglis asserts that Double Jay represented a considerable
investment in terms of
the ABC's finances, especially when compared to the budget for the
TV pop
show Countdown, which was only a fraction of Double
Jay's funding -- remarkably, Countdown
subsisted on a mere $5000 per week, about 1/3 of Double Jay's
weekly budget.

The new station was given premises in the basement of the ABC
building at 171 William St, a former WWII bomb shelter that had been
converted into emergency studios. It was
close to the ABC's Studio 221, a former church hall often used
for live drama, which was located just up the stairs in neighbouring
Clapton
Place.
Double Jay quickly took the space over for its innovative weekly
live concert broadcasts, and it also rescued the ABC Radio outside
broadcast van (which was about to be scrapped) and was soon using it to
make live recordings at venues and outdoor concerts all over Sydney.

The first station
coordinators
were Marius
Webb and Ron Moss.
Webb, a former member of ABC Special
Projects under Allan
Ashbolt, had worked
mainly on talk programs. Moss had been the producer of Room
To Move and Rock On Sunday. The new team
took on the
task of providing a desperately-needed alternative to the Top
40 programming which dominated the commercial pop stations.

Itn setting up the station, Winter, Moss and the Double Jay
team took their lead
from Room To Move, and
from overseas
radio innovations like the new American album-oriented rock format,
pirate radio and the BBC's John Peel.
Although they were expected to get ratings in their target 18-25
age group, Double Jay deliberately pursued a very eclectic programming
policy. In an interview with Margaret McIntyre of the Sydney Sunday
Telegraph, published on Double Jay's first day day of
broadcasting,
Webb and Moss were outspoken in their views on the restrictive
nature of commercial pop radio, and displayed a certain amount
of glee in proclaiming Double Jay's freedom from this perceived
'tyranny':

Marius Webb:
"... one of the troubles with commercial radio is that the
most creative thing about it is the advertising. There are so many
really creative people, writers, producers, musicians, tied up with the
advertising side that they work for the advertisers, not the audience.
Commercial radio is selling and packaging a product. They are
delivering unfortunately, with a minimal amount of entertainment, an
audience to an advertiser who wants to sell something."

"One of the most exciting aspects of 2JJ is the respect it has for its
audience. It sees them as people whose musical tastes have been ignored
by commercial radio - people who will choose to listen to good and
varied music rather than 40 or so recycled throughout the day."

"Commercial radio at the moment is like a spectator sport. It is
totally
non-involving. It really doesn't even need to be listened to. We want
to provide creative radio that involves the listeners as much as
people. People should feel that 2JJ is their station."

Ron Moss: "We really want to style the station
on the values of its audience. As a result of this attitude, 2JJ's
musical policy is far bolder than that of its commercial counterparts..
Under the category of rock they include folk, blues, Jamaican blues
(Reggae), soul and jazz. We aim to reflect the tastes of our audience
and to do that we have to remain flexible."

"For instance last year when Stephane Grapelli was in Australia I was
amazed by the number of young people who attended his concerts. In such
a case we have to change our programming accordingly. Obviously there
is a market for it so we will program it. In this we are luckier than
our competitors."

"They are continually going for the greatest audience potential which
in
practice usually means they aim at the lowest common demoninator. We
don't mind if at certain times we have low audiences What we are after
is an overall large audience but at times we can afford to cater to
minority musical tastes as well."

- Sydney Sunday Telegraph,
19 January 1975, p.73

"And we're away!"

With its new call sign, 2JJ, and its frequency set at 1540 kHz
on the
AM band, Double Jay began broadcasting from the
William St basement studios began at
11am on Sunday 19 January 1975. Media and public
interest
was high, and it was fanned by clever strategic marketing, such as the
"Head of the Dial" posters, badges and stickers. In the days leading up
to the opening, Double Jay teased listeners -- and simultaneously
tested transmission -- by playing continuous actuality field recordings
of the sounds of Sydney's streets.Another strategic move was the
scheduling of the first broadcast
-- it took place on a Sunday morning, right
in the middle of the December-January school/university
holidays, ensuring high exposure in their target
18-25 audience bracket

With its first song, Double
Jay boldly proclaimed its rebellious stance. After a pre-recorded
introduction, which climaxed with the audio recording of the launch of
Apollo
11, the
station began its first shift, with Holger Brockmann proclaiming "Wow!
And we're off!", as he cross-faded into the first music track. It was
an inspired choice, and one which immediately passed
into legend. The song selected as the first to be played on-air
was Skyhooks' "(You Just Like Me 'Cos I'm) Good in Bed",
the opening track from their landmark LP Living In
The Seventies.
Programming this song as the first track on the first day of broadcast
- and on the Sabbath, no less -- caused an uproar, a
fact which no doubt delighted the mischievous wowser-baiters at
Double Jay.

The choice of band
and track also carried clear political messages about Double Jay's
attitude and intentions. Skyhooks was a new Australian band
from Melbourne who had recently signed to an Australian independent
label,
Mushroom. Skyhooks had
become a major pop phenomenon, but their songs
were also being praised by critics for their acerbic lyric
style and their novel use of Australian names and
locales ("Carlton", "Balwyn Calling"). Their
controversial debut LP (produced
by former Daddy
Cool
leader Ross
Wilson) had been released a few months earlier and it had already
produced a national #1 hit ("Horror Movie") and was well on
the
way to becoming the most successful Australian album
ever released up to that time.

Most significantly, six of the ten tracks on Living In The Seventies
-- including
"Good
in Bed" -- had been banned by
commercial radio because
of sexual and drug references. Double Jay's blatant flouting
of commercial radio's "gentleman's agreement" on
censorship was seen as a deliberate act of provocation, made all
the more rankling because Double Jay was
not subject to the Broadcasting Control Board's
regulations and was directly answerable only to the ABC Board.

(The choice of the often-forgotten second track was
also significant. It was The Rolling Stones "Sympathy For The Devil",
the opening track from their 1968 LP Beggar's Banquet --
an album track that ran for over six minutes. According to
Chris Winter, it was chosen because it had never been played
on Australian commerical radio, despite the fact that the LP was by
then over five years old.)

Another clear signal of
Double Jay's alternative direction was its choice of on-air personnel.
Although it might seem a minor issue today, Double
Jay's on-air roster signalled a major step
forward in breaking down some of the long-standing hypocrisies and
prejudices
in Australian
radio. This attitude was signalled from the outset -- the first DJ on
air
on 19 January was Holger Brockman, a former 2SM presenter,
who had previously been obliged to use the pseudonym Bill
Drake -- a requirement presumably based on the assumption by 2SM
management that non-Anglo-Saxon
names would somehow frighten, offend or confuse "Australian"
audiences. The choice of the name "Bill Drake" had another significance
for commercial radio professionals -- the 'real' Bill Drake was the
American co-founder of the famous programming consultancy
Drake-Chenault, originators of the "More Music" format, which
was the basis for Rod Muir's Digamae operation.

Double Jay's original on-air
team was chosen from across the country, with Webb and Moss ensuring
a mix of staff from the ABC and commercial
radio. Graeme
Berry had previously worked with 5KA Adelaide and 3XY Melbourne,
and was a pioneer of the "album show" format on commercial
radio; Holger Brockmann and South African-born George "Groover" Wayne
were
former 2SM "Good Guys"; Mike Parker was from a commercial stations in
Perth, Alan McGirvan from Newcastle's 2HD. Gayle Austin was
the
co-ordinator of the talkback callers for John Laws at 2UW. The ABC
contingent included
Ron Moss, Marius Webb and Room To Move's Chris
Winter.

Other notable DJs came on board over the succeeding months --
folk singer and songwriter Bob Hudson (whose 1975 hit "The Newcastle
Song" was one of the few recordings not played on
Double
Jay), Hudson's fellow Novocastrian and singer-songwriter John
J. Francis, who held down
the dogwatch shift for most of the next ten years. Other presenters
included Tom Zelinka, Lawrie
Zion, and the station's second female DJ, Keri Phillips (now a producer
with Radio National, married to former Double Jay news
reporter Mark Colvin),

Gender equity was another
major breakthrough. Although somewhat more common now, Double Jay
was, amazingly enough, the first Australian pop station (and one
of the first in the world) to employ a female announcer. In this
case the line honours went to Gayle Austin, a former
producer for rising talkback king John Laws and Catholic radio
priest
Father Jim McLaren. She had "hit the glass ceiling" at 2UW and applied
for the Double Jay job after hearing about it from a colleague.
Although
there were still barriers to be broken
(Austin was initially relegated to late-night timeslots) it was
an important step forward. Even so, Austin' appointment rankled with
some listeners, as she recalled in her SMH article in 2005:

"I was given one
midnight-to-dawn shift a week, a move so radical that I was the cause
of much negative comment after our first survey of listeners. 'Why do
you have a woman on air? What do women know about music?' "

The station's programming
policy strongly favoured local artists; from the outset Double
Jay had the highest Australian content of any station in the county,
and live music broadcasts of performances by local bands quickly
became an staple of their programming. Original comedy was another
a major component, including contributions from the Aunty Jack
team ("Nude Radio"); the team of Gary Reilly and Tony
Sattler wrote the sketch comedy "
(later transferred to Radio 1) and the parody sci-fi serial Chuck
Chunder Of The Space Patrol, as well as numerous fake ads.
There was also a string of soap opera parodies, penned under the
pseudonym 'Fiona Wintergreen' -- "Jealous Throbs The Heart",
"Throb Forward Cruel Heart", "Damned Is My Desire",
"Rapture Be My Witness", and (a few years later )
the Brideshead spoof Brunswick Heads Revisited.

If the opening day raised
eyebrows, conservative fears of moral decay were soon realised
in spectacular fashion. On 23 February, Double Jay broadcast the
ground-breaking audio-verité series The Ins and Outs Of
Love, made by former 2SM producers Carl Tyson-Hall and
Tony Poulsen,
which presented frank first-hand accounts of young
people's first sexual experiences. The program was prefaced by an
uneqivocal warning, stating clearly that the show's
content might offend and that anyone likely to be offended
should tune out, but needless to say, it provoked
a torrent of complaints and was even mentioned in federal Parliament.
Media commentator Clement
Semmler
was one who was appalled by the show's "disgustingly explicit accounts
of the sexual behaviour of young teenagers".
The controversy led to the series being reviewed by the ABC Board in
April
and they issued a mild reprimand. According to Kenneth Inglis,
the series was also

"...the subject of a delicate exchange
between the
Chairman of the Control Board and [ABC Chair] Downing over the Board's
difficulty in enforcing on commercial stations standards not accepted
by the ABC, and the Commission's right to ignore the Board's views if
it chose."

Throughout its AM years, Double Jay was dogged by reception
problems, although its transmitter
location also had some unexpected benefits. Double Jay used the
relatively low-powered 2BL emergency transmitter, mounted on the ABC
tower at Gore Hill. Reception around town was patchy
at best; it was best in the western and southern suburbs, and
worst in the eastern and inner northern suburbs. But under the
right conditions the carrying power of the AM signal was considerable,
since AM signals could bounce off the ionosphere at night and
travel much further than FM. This meant that Double Jay could
be picked up from a significant distance away and it soon had
regular nightly listeners west to the Blue Mountains, up and down the
coast to Newcastle and Wollongong.

Despite the reception problems,
the station made an immediate impact. As early as July, ratings
surveys indicated that it had already gained almost 6 percent
of the total audience. Best of all -- for Double Jay -- the ratings
showed that 22 percent of its target audience in the 18-25 age
group were regular listeners, making it the second highest rating
rock station in Sydney -- much to the chagrin of 2SM.